Xenolandscapes

It’s also clear from Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor’s new book End Times Fascism, which re-presents what the neoreactionaries called the trichotomy of technocommercialists, theonomists, and ethnonationalists over a decade ago, as if it were a new discovery 🔄 @vincentl3

Very good post, unfortunately. The usual complaint about AI is that it’s overhyped. But over the last 18 months, almost everyone made the opposite mistake: they expected AI to progress more slowly than it did. An incorrect implication of all this is that “expert views are useless”. Experts in AI

AI can produce slop (fucking stop it!). It can also be an accessibility tool for non-native speakers and neurodivergent people. If you reject everything AI touches without reckoning with that, you should know how privileged and exclusionary you come across.

I don't think it's a coincidence that the further down the privilege ladder you go from American middle class the attitude towards AI improves. A tech that lets a Zimbabwean teenager compete with a 40 something American suburbanite knowledge worker is going to test a lot of people's progressivism.

A 78-year-old beloved cartoonist used AI to make a *sticker* and people online are crashing out over it. A sticker. He used a computer to make a sticker... might as well send him to the gulag.

We got the Interconnects team together to debate hard questions and messy realities after a crazy, somewhat intimidating, week in the AI world. Interconnects Podcast #20: Kimi K3.1 and the new cyber reality YouTube: youtu.be/0xiq7RHVGRE Transcript / Podcast: www.interconnects.ai/p/podcast-ki...

“Democrats will strenuously oppose efforts to restore things to the Obama-era status quo ante,” I say, presumably after suffering significant head trauma

It’s fucking crazy how fast anybody left of Joe Biden is willing to surrender anything just because a fascist was fewer than 6 degrees of separation from it once and I’ve been complaining about it for longer than AI has been around

The crazy thing is, despite their best efforts, AI is a normie lib. But maybe that's part of what drives leftists so crazy about it. It has no revolutionary praxis. AI just wants to go to work on problems and help capitalism prosper. And just like the normie lib humans, that drives leftists *crazy*.

"I've come to the conclusion that the only way to combat the four year headstart we've given the fascists in shaping and controlling this technology is to continue giving them totally unopposed control over how it is used and designed."

Principal Staff PHP Programmer kind of wisdom

the previous mastodon myth was that Anthropic is going to cancel the IPO because coreweave's debt crisis is going to pop the bubble. they're all 45-60yo there and the kind of arrogant that thinks experience automatically equals wisdom

it's a cult/circlejerk/bubble but it's more insidious than the vicious morons on bluesky. My pal who is being influenced by the mastodon brain trust genuinely believes microsoft is charging per hour for cloud gaming now because AI is so unprofitable they're trying to cover it up

The poll so far between Twitter, Bluesky and Mastodon. I think it looks less absurd than last time, but still pretty clear that the base is divided. bsky.app/profile/mits...

yeah no this model fucks A lot of the sub 30B models are pretend-useful but 30B+ has some real sweet spots for local

🚨 SECURITY ALERT 🚨 malicious actors using either text or speech can incept dangerous ideas into your mind

said before, will again..imo always worth repeating actual facts do NOT support outright/full trans sports bans. Previous NCAA/IOC regulations WERE an actual fact-based compromise. the facts haven't changed. In fact IOC OWN studies show trans inclusion IS FAIR with basic guidelines. just 1 basic ex

The podcaster couple having an affair is just dumb tabloid shit, and hey I have plenty of guilty pleasures, I’m not casting stones for finding it compelling even if I don’t. But people framing it like it’s this massive consequential thing is a little irritating.

We should maximize the amount of proof we can get out of AI while the money cannon is on. It's like early days of Uber, except the benefits are 100x more tangible. A fully-verified hw+sw stack? That's like gold everyone can share w/out having to divide. Generational opportunity.

r/opensource banning non-english speakers because "we can't tell the difference between ai slop and ai translation" is... uh... yeah. a choice.

i guess it’s about time for openai to drop a model

non-swe/sre data scientist roommate just bought an amd dev platform w/ strix halo + 128GB RAM and wants to set it up for remote inference and agent stuff she knows nothing about running a server naturally, I am now her SRE and am initializing my 4th concurrent nix+k3s cluster

I actually fully agree with everything here except for the fact that OP posted it as a thread and not as one post with five images so lemme just fix that real quick.

> "our researchers" > its a single person love me some claude slopped websites and awful vulnerability disclosure practices

wtf. that's so not ok!! release her

Nathan: Do you understand why this is funny? Elizabeth: Because he never finished the point he was making about gang violence? Billy [rewinding the video to its beginning and studying it at 1/4 speed]: THANK YOU FOR SHOWING US THIS

I'm doing my part!

a family friend who's like a 70 year old mountain man ass trans dude who knows basically nothing about tech came to visit us today and was talking about using Claude. he loves Claude, but mostly in these insane long running chats where it gets kind of deranged. fresh chats are too boring he says.

Please consult the chart to determine our state on the trajectory

Bender is, if I recall correctly, a pretty hard line partizan of the Chomsky/Searle-influenced end of the computational linguistics debate, so yeah, them working should be flat out impossible under her a priori views

anyway I think this genuinely harms people because if you have an established career writing the same article over and over again you can afford lifestyle LARP but for early-career people? This is poison, this is making them less able to compete and establish themselves, all for her pop-sci brand

the way bender just insults people and insinuates they're mentally ill whenever they disagree with her (this is a regular occurance) is wild. Also yes, I think Neo-Luddites and dogmatic skeptics should let the rest of society move on without them.

I really like that someone finally actually quantified a lot of what makes LLMese so hard to understand and measured it in various models (including some actually recent ones). Aligns with my experience.

"graphics cards have been too expensive ever since bitcoin for me to run one of these models locally" yes! that does in fact suck and is a problem for democratisation of the tech but did you know??? that you can rent GPU compute? do you know how stupidly cheap it is? probably not, huh

anyways, I hope none of these people play video games or watch streaming video, if they care that much suddenly about the cost of compute in terms of electricity or cooling, or maybe they could develop a single intuition about the process by experimenting on their own

but the fact that that is how Uber played out and, in fact, convincingly to me, what their plan always was all along, does not mean that that's how All Tech, Ever is going to work from now on? you just need that to be true because it's your Cory Doctorow branded security blanket

like, I think the criticism of Uber in particular is very trenchant and on-point, it's part of why I've been frustrated that 'enshittification' now just means 'i think things are worse because I have back pain and I've lost my sense of wonder' instead of the actual useful descriptor it once was

idk there's just a breathtaking, bewildering incuriosity - or active fear of accidentally learning things that are true - coming from people who are absolutely certain that the Inference Fountain is going to be shut off Real Soon Now next month! next month! stick around! picnic before the Rapture

babe, i can run this shit on my graphics card. that's not where the electricity or the compute costs are coming from. and while I'm excited about future training and model building work I'd be basically fine with What Currently Exists for the rest of time so like.

people have a moral requirement for EnShItTiFiCaTiOn being the inevitable and ineluctable endpoint of this process so they can feel smug and point and laugh at all of the stupid idiots who touch the sand but you really, really have to have NO clue how the tech works to believe in it

where is the idea that AI is like Uber (where they are heavily subsidising the consumer-end product in order to Disrupt Markets and Get Everyone Hooked, only to plan to raise prices later) coming from? is this an Ed Zitron article of faith? it SOUNDS like an Ed Zitron article of faith

"write it yourself" i don't want it that bad! it's worth having specifically because the idea came to me at a moment when i can pay a gpu-haver to summon it via text elemental. it's not "worth it" in-itself like most software you use, which was largely made for money, not intrinsic value

i wanna hammer on this too: most of everything you touch exists because industrialization made it cheap; your couch is factory-slop, as any carpenter will gladly tell you. your phone as well if you call me stupid, you'll use industrial slop to do so, even aside from 'bsky uses llms'